Oliver Stone apparently saw combat in Vietnam, so I'd have to be pretty ballsy to call him a sissy boy considering I haven't been in a gunfight since my public high school days. However, years of presumed drug use and New Age hooey have apparently turned Stone's brain to mush, and if you don't believe me, grab a magazine and screen Natural Born Killers (1994).

The crime-spree movie has long been an important sub-genre of guy flicks. Just check out Bonnie and Clyde, or even Badlands, for good examples. But with Natural Born Killers, Stone has managed to take a fine and oft-used concept (couple in love on a murder spree) and turn it into and unwatchable and incomprehensible splat of celluloid. Dig:

The original script was by Quentin Tarantino, although you won't see his name as screenwriter in the final film. Don't let that fool you, though--a good 90% of the material in the film is his. He was just wise enough to know that a real man like him shouldn't be associated with a flaccid film like this one. The major differences between his original script and the final product are that a lot of his humor was taken out, and a lot of New Age baloney was put in to replace it.

And let's talk about humor. Stone has said this film is a comedy--you can see him extracting all manner of things from his anus in an attempt to get laughs. The problem is, and anyone who's seen any of his films can back me up on this, the man basically has no sense of humor. So he'll throw in slapstick, and characters with funny hair, and shots of Robert Downey Jr. sticking things in his nose, and think he's scored a zinger. He'll even botch a decent and fairly amusing line like a clueless Gen-Xer's "If I was a mass murderer, I'd be Mickey and Mallory," by following it up with a another character's double-take just so we know it was a joke ('that was funny, see?' he seems to be saying. 'Wasn't that a good joke!'). The man might as well just stick in a laugh track. Oh, wait, that's right . . . in one scene, he actually does.

But then subtlety has never been Stone's strong point, and subtlety is one of the greatest virtues of a real man. Take Clint Eastwood, for example, and the tremendous depth of meaning he can convey with one squinty gaze--if Stone directed Eastwood, he would no doubt have the man follow up his squint with a four minute speech about how dangerous he was, and intercut shots of grizzly bears or something.

Stone's drop-an-anvil-on-their-head style of directing is at its most heavy-handed in Natural Born Killers--the film is supposed to be a critique of modern media or something, and in order to convey the information-saturated world we live in, Stone edits the hell out of the picture, cutting every couple of seconds through different kinds of film stocks, video, animations, styles from sit-com to horror film to old-fashioned melodrama . . . after about 20 minutes, it becomes impossible to watch, but what's more, why does he do it? By wallowing in the very disassociated media bombardment he seems to be criticizing, is he really adding to our understanding in any way? After coming out of this film headachy and exhausted, my first thought was, if he has something to say, why doesn't he just write a fucking essay? (I mean, that's what a real man does.)

Okay, so maybe you liked the visual anarchy of the film . . . if you were on hallucinogens, you probably did. But that's still no excuse for why the film makes no thematic sense. I mean, what the hell are Mickey and Mallory supposed to be, anyway? Based on the title, and the goofy story told by the Native American mystic (needless to say, that was not in Tarantino's original), and the repeated shots of snakes, wolves, and birds of prey, and Mickey's own testimony, you'd think they were natural born killers--born bad, born to kill. Then why the reflections on their traumatic childhoods? We see both of them being abused by their parents, and Mickey actually kills that Indian dude after a traumatic flashback (he feels bad about this murder for some reason, but his sexual torture and murder of a pretty, half-naked blonde is treated with leering good humor). Or maybe they're demons, as the words projected on their chests (there's that anvil again) would imply. Or another projection which says "too much T.V.," and is telling us, I guess, that they're a product of the information age.

In other words, Mickey and Mallory are a couple of demons, born to kill, who, because of traumatic childhoods, and too much television, actual do it. Needless to say, this all makes very little sense. It may seem weird to say that Natural Born Killers fails as a guy movie because it lacks thematic consistency, but I gotta say, I think that's the case. Stone hasn't thought through any of the ideas that he's claims to be talking about, and tries to cover it up by serving up every visual trick he can think of, one right after the other.

Real men mean what they say, and say what they know. Oliver Stone should put down that doobie to clear his head, and read a fucking book.

On to an even dumber picture -->